Earlier this month, we highlighted The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 846 Film Critics. Featuring films by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Welles and Fellini, this master list came together in 2012 when Sight & Sound(the cinema journal of the British Film Institute) asked contemporary critics and directors to name their 12 favorite movies. Nearly 900 cinephiles responded, and, from those submissions, a meta list of 10 was culled.

So how about something similar for books, you ask? For that, we can look back to 2007, when J. Peder Zane, the book editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, asked 125 top writers to name their favorite books -- writers like Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Michael Chabon. The lists were all compiled in an edited collection, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, and then prefaced by one uber list, “The Top Top Ten."

Zane explained the methodology behind the uber list as follows: "The participants could pick any work, by any writer, by any time period.... After awarding ten points to each first-place pick, nine to second-place picks, and so on, the results were tabulated to create the Top Top Ten List - the very best of the best."

The short list appears below, along with links to electronic versions of the works. There's one notable exception, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. We couldn't provide that text, but we do have something special -- an audio recording of Nabokov reading a chapter from his controversial 1955 novel.

The texts listed below are permanently housed in our collection of Free eBooks, along with many other classics. In many cases, you'll find audio versions of the same works in our ever-growing collection of Free Audio Books. If you have questions about how to load files onto your Kindle, please see this related instructional video.

Got an issue with any of the selections? Tell us all about it in the comments section below.

No “Moby-Dick”? Really? And two by Tolstoy on the list is a bit much, I think. Also, no “Don Quijote de la Mancha”? Seriously? And I echo the sentiment of MB. The absence of Dostoyevsky is mind-boggling. Also, “The 10 Greatest Books” list your authors compiled invoves eight novels, one collection of short fiction, and one play. So, there is nothing else to great literature? No non-fiction? No poetry? Hmmmm… Oh, and while we’re bringing up complaints and grievances, the compilers of this list were a bit short on comedy (“Huckleberry Finn” and “Lolita” provide some comedy, but in a sideways sort of fashion).nnnSeriously, guys, a very strange list.

Lists always come with questions and discussions. Who are the “125 Top Authors”? How were they selected? Was a comparison made with a list determined by an alternative “125 Top Authors”?nBut anyway, I believe lists are useful as guides helping readers to notice important works.

Recently reread Lolita; it doesn’t belong on this list. Wanders widely off base at the end and simply isn’t one of Nabokov’s best. Gatsby’s great but in the top ten? The whole list rates an eh? It’s as if the names were pulled out of a hat.

Agreed. And both Anna Karinina and Madame Bovary are about women who committed adultery and couldn’t live with the consequences–one by taking arsenic and the other by throwing herself under a train. One or the other might be on the list, but not both.

Agreed. And both Anna Karinina and Madame Bovary are about women who committed adultery and couldn’t live with the consequences–one by taking arsenic and the other by throwing herself under a train. One or the other might be on the list, but not both.

C’mon. Two Tolstoy books and no Dostoyevsky? Chekhov, Flaubert, Nabokov are excellent writers but they are petty bourgeois compared to authors such as Dostoyevsky, Homer, Balzac, Machado de Assis, Borges, Faulkner, Mishima, Goethe, Joyce…

C’mon. Two Tolstoy books and no Dostoyevsky? Chekhov, Flaubert, Nabokov are excellent writers but they are petty bourgeois compared to authors such as Dostoyevsky, Homer, Balzac, Machado de Assis, Borges, Faulkner, Mishima, Goethe, Joyce…

to the lighthousenle pianiste nto kill a mocking birdnmrs dalloway nbelovednI know why the caged bird singsnthe awakening nnnThose are just off the top of my head and all are better than Gatsby!nnnAlso, to be fair, let’s not forget about the tremendous oppression of female anythings prior to this century, and for that matter, in the present.

You people who are bitching about what’s been left off, it’s not the website’s fault. Did you read what the criteria is? “…asked 125 top writers to name their favorite books…” nBlame the writers!nPersonally I don’t agree with a couple of selections, Madame Bovary heads my list. I found it difficult to read because the main character is just so unlikable. Same with Lolita, I hated the lecherous main character and the way he excuses his actions.

Well, they’re all good books, but of course one could argue endlessly about what is and isn;t here. I’d pick Moby Dick and Absalom, Absalom myself. But my greater concern is that there’s a radical flaw in this. The authors were asked what are their FAVORITE books, and this was translated into what are the GREATEST books. These are probably overlapping lists, but I seriously doubt that for most serious readers they are identical.

How is everyone missing the point that this isn’t a list of the ten greatest books? Read the article, not just the (misleading) title. This is a list of ten books that were most frequently nominated as favourites by 125 top writers. I’m not sure who everyone is arguing with in their outraged comments.

Wow. Right. No Dostoyevsky? Although relatively “light,” I would have put one of Hesse’s works there somewhere, too. Gatsby? No way. And, if you’re going to include one of Shakespeare’s plays, why not other theater? Lysistrata? Yes, also on Camus.

This list is by the Gay and Lesbian leage. It is the forerunner to the decadent state of affairs we have today where trash like “Gerry Springer” and ” Real Housewives of …” are more widely viewed than the classics as aired on Masterpiece Theater. It s no wonder that the society is about to disintegrate with critics who view the above list as worthwhile. 80% of the above belongs in the shredder. I am glad I am an old man and my time will end soon…

“80% of the above belongs in the shredder” Seriously? Give your head a shake. Btw, what exactly is the “Gay and Lesbian leage” I’m neither….but just to piss you off I think I’ll sign up….if they’ll have me.

Go Down Moses, Light in August, the Snopes Trilogy by Faulkner. East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Sophie’s Choice by William Stryon. The Color Purple. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Never read anything by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edgar Allen Poe. Only read short stories by Heminway–a master of them. And always, always read Huckleberry Finn–it is the first excellent American novel and always on point.

Well, considering the deep Christian beliefs of Dante and Cervantes, I feel the Bhagavad Gita should be replaced with the Bible. But, thanks for listing some greats that are overlooked by this trashy list!

i don’t see moby-dick in this list. odd, because the older i get, the more i appreciate its brilliance, both in content and style. it set a high bar for everything that followed. yes, it makes certain demands of the reader, but then, great art should provoke thought and curiosity.

“Middlemarch” is soooo great. Every page contains a perfect, original metaphor, expressed as effortlessly as if gifted from the gods. Fantastically realized characters. And long, a long book, the reader lives in the eponymous town for a surrogate lifetime. Wonderful.

Hmmm, some of these are not close to being in my top 50… No Mention of Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Simone de Beauvoir?Jorge Luis Borges? Goethe? Nietzche? It seems the list is for highschool level readers within the USA: really really weak literature.

Besides Proust, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare, those are WEAK. Hmmm, some of these are not close to being in my top 50… No Mention of Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Simone de Beauvoir?Jorge Luis Borges? Goethe? Nietzche? It seems the list is for highschool level readers within the USA: really really weak literature.

So, Proust, Gatsby and Lolita are the only 20th Century choices to make the Top Ten — and only one of those from the latter half? Interesting. No Ulysses. No Dickens or Bronte sister or Austen or Wharton or Henry James, but Eliot (I actually love “Middlemarch” but…). Heavy on the Russkies. Chekhov and doubling down on Tolstoy, but why no Dostoevsky (I woulda taken “Brothers Karamozov” over “War and Peace”). No Latin or African writers — agree with those who think Marquez or Borges or Vargas Llosa or Achebe could/should have snuck in there. Also, isn’t there ANY late 20th Century, early 21st Century work that measures up? Pynchon? Wallace? Heller? Hell, Vonnegut. And, I know this sounds shitty, and I’m not one of the great 125 writers polled, but gimme Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” or “East of Eden” over anything Fitzgerald ever wrote any day of the week. In fact, I’ll take Dreiser or even Sinclair Lewis over Fitzgerald. Finally, am I the only one who thinks “Lolita” is just kinda creepy. I will say this. Totally not shocked to see a dearth of Ayn Rand. Let’s all say a prayer for that one.

I do respect your opinion but I have to say that these lists and charts are great for me just so I can choose which book to read next since I consider myself pretty young and ignorant when it comes to books

I’d prefer a list that doesn’t compare apples and oranges – Proust’s entry is actually 7 books (!), and short story collections and dramatic works are not novels (obviously). If the rules are this ill-defined, I would put the complete “Peanuts” by Charles Schultz as issued by Fantagraphics Books on the list!

I’ve read all of them and many, many, many more. It’s impossible to put the best in such a small list, there should be at least 100. And it is always a subjective list, so better not do it. The lacking writers are so important! Culture would not be the same without them.

I’ve read all of them and many, many, many more. It’s impossible to put the best in such a small list, there should be at least 100. And it is always a subjective list, so better not do it. The lacking writers are so important! Culture would not be the same without them.

1. These are all novels. Not all books are novels.nnn2. Two books by Tolstoy, but no Dostoevsky?nnn3. They are all relatively recent books. There is nothing from the ancient authors or anything before the 1800s. Pretty glaring omission, if you ask me.nnn4. Great Gatsby? Really?

Sorry Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Milton, and Goethe, you didn’t make the cut. This just shows why modern literature is frivolous. “What are the classics but the noblest thoughts recorded by man?” (Thoreau, Walden “Reading).

Gatsby is a good book, but Emily Bronte did the whole love triangle/boy amasses wealth and prestige to win over girl who rejected him so much better, with more complexity, depth and experimentation in Wuthering Heights. As for 20th Century literature? The Leopard by Guiseppe Lampedusa really is deserving of a place in more of these polls, certainly one of the greatest novels written in my mind.

A very special editions of Geronimo Stilton is – The hunt for the golden book,The kingdom of fantasy,The amazing voyage, dragon prophecy and the Journey through the time are the very special editions of Geronimo Stilton.I love these kind of books very much.

This list is too lily white and full of men. Ms. Eliot is the sole exception as a female, but there are no people of color on this list.

Why lists like these continue to perpetuate that books written by old white men are to be heralded as the default “great” and the rest are either too “niche” for women and/or PoC or simply not good enough continues to frustrate and even baffle me.

The more people are exposed to these “top ten” lists that supposedly have great book suggestions which include women and people of color, the more people’s minds can shift. Isn’t that obvious?

I think curators of such lists need to understand that. I think that the journalists or writers who ASK the question, “What are you favorite books?” or “favorite authors?” need to ask questions that would inspire answers that include contemporary writers who ARE women AND PoC.

No one’s arguing that those writers up there are good writers. We’ve been TOLD that they are since middle school all the way through college. But we’re not told ENOUGH about writers who happen to be women and PoC.

The methodology is faulty. That’s why this list is so bad. This is more like a list of what 125 writers consider the best single book. If you went back to the original authors and asked them what important books are missing, then you’d get a better list.

If Don Quixote is not on the list, this is rubbish. The jury should be ashamed of the result. Like the Times list and others, too much fashion, snobism and anglosaxon chauvinism. Also they forgot Dostoievski, Homer and others…
This is a list made by writers from ALL the world, not your sad “conciliabulo” of suposed top authorshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokklubben_World_Library

Such lists are quite meaningless: they could have picked another group of distinguished literati who would have come up with something different. However, in the present list I would not include Mark Twain and Fitzgerald. If there are any American writers who have achieved some sort of universality, they would be Melville and Faulkner. I suspect the others were there because it was mostly an American panel and they all read them in school or college. Homer and Sophocles should have been there, as well as Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Leopoldo Alas and Cervantes (DQ is the greatest novel no-one has actually read today). I would also have added Virginia Woolf. These lists are fun, but reducing them to ten people is arbitrary.

Certainly, lists are always questionable for their arbitrariness, but the two books you mentioned are indisputable two great masterpieces.

The literature means metaphors; it means exploration of human beings and it is motivated by the writers’ urgency to investigate the complexity and contradictory human souls’ depth and/or the social relations.

While Tolstoy’s inspiration is the empathy with the others to understand himself better, and so his novels are always moral, philosophical, sociological exploration, Flaubert’s intent is a social criticism.

Emma Bovary is a critic of the bourgeoisie whose behavior is determined by appearance and alienation from oneself. Emma married a physician to upgrade her social status. Conversely, she discovers that the “right groom” is only a coarse peasant without either vocation or intellect. He became physician only for the same desire of social climbing that pushed her to marry him. Thus, disappointed not to have found the glittering life that she wanted first she pushes her husband to try a risky surgery hoping to let him get fame so she could enjoy reflex of his glory, successively, this attempt failed, she vents her discontent by looking for love. Unfortunately, selfish, superficial people cannot love, and so she falls in an equivocal and expensive love affair that makes her in debts. Therefore, she swallows rat poison to escape the usurer’s blackmail. Is it a real suicide, or an attempt went over due? The author describes an equivocal situation. Maybe she simulated to get the erase of her debt promissory, or she wanted to overturn her unpleasant situation, or she did not exactly know what she wanted because she cannot introspect. During the trial for obscenity, the writer said “Emma Bovary, c’est moi!” a claim that the obscenity is the appearance’s emptiness and alienation that concern all of us.

On the contrary Tolstoy’s emotional masterpiece is a complex plot of many stories, e.g. Levin’s Bildungsroman (by the way, Levin=diminutive of Lev, the name of the author), the Oblovsky’s adultery, Nikolai’s illness, etc.

There is the contraposition of the purity of the idealized countryside life and the corrupt and the hypocrite life of aristocracy, and a deep analysis of social and matrimonial usages, the asymmetry of the husbands that can grant the divorce or deny it, and the wives that are at the mercy of their “owners”. The writer criticizes the pernicious influence of religious fanaticism that forgives lust, but punishes love, and so on.

At the end, the Anna‘s suicide is the consequence of her and Vroskij’s exile in his estate because of the ostracism for their “Wertherian passion” (Vronskij’s mother’s quote). Her isolation pushes her to doubt of her lover’s feelings and suspect that it was only an infatuation. She asks herself if she sacrificed all of her life, her son, her honored position, her social relations for an illusion. As in the predestination figured in the scenario of her meeting with Vronskij, she throws herself on the tracks, but she does not die immediately. Vronskij gets to the station and founds her on the table of ticket office. She is agonizing, deformed by the broken spine, gibbering in a painful mask. He is upset, and he declares he is going to leave for Crimea’s war, and his mother agrees because she thought he lost his honor. His train trip towards the front is one of the most powerful antimilitarist manifesto indeed the description of players who flee gambling debts, peasants who wish to offer a chance to their families, and so on, shows war as an escape for losers.

It is impossible to summarize the richness and the beauty of these works and explore all their multifaceted, deep metaphors. Anyway, I had to testify their value.

I want to see the list of India’s top author book. Your website is very informative I just search about latest jobs in jobisearch.com. I found your website is very useful for latest updates about education and students. Who want to know about education I bookmark your site and also recruitment to all of my friends.

Had a ball reading all the comments. Just like comparisons, lists are odious. I’m suggesting a much more recent book, Freedom by Jonathon Franzen. Don’t anyone throw stones. I absolutely loved it. Walter Bergland is my fave. Oh and I agree about Cormac McCarthy. He should be on the odious list as well.

A list is a list is a list. Sure, none of the books on this list are bad, most of them are better than bad, they’re good. Are they great? Sure. Personally, I’m glad to see “In Search of Lost Time” but confused by the absence of “Ulysses.” I enjoyed “Wuthering Heights” more than “Pride and Prejudice,” but the latter might be a better choice for such a enumeration. Kafka’s “The Trial” would make my list, but not every reader can relate to it’s sentiment. Then again, I certainly cannot relate to Gatsby. “War and Peace” is massive, but isn’t “Les Miserable” a better story? “Moby Dick,” “Iliad,” and “Odyssey” are all on my list, but that reflects the kinds of books I like to read. My point? My point is that these types of lists serve us best as catalysts for discussion, with civility I would hope, and that such a conversation might lead us to consider a few well aged titles we’d not previously considered.

Lolita belongs on most anyone’s top ten list. The Grapes of Wrath should be too. I’ve read many books in my life and several on this list. Here’s a book that few have heard of but should read. The Stones of Summer. It reaches inside of you with the best of them. And I might add Hektor Atredes sentiments about lists was right on the money.

1. Catcher in the Rye
2. Crime and Punishment
3. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
4. Black Boy
5. War and Peace
6. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
7. Palace Walk
8. The Stranger
9. The Black Prince
10. Tie – Rabbit Run and All the Pretty Horses

125 of the most prominent living writers submitted their individual Top Tens from which this cumulative list was compiled, using the standard points formula. did you not read the methodology of this list? take up your grievances with the likes of Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Michael Chabon since they are the compilers.

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.

FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA

About Us

Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.